'Salt': Perfect with popcorn

'Salt' ✭✭✭

Both are worth seeing, but "Salt" is the opposite of "Inception." It isn't trying to reinvent anyone's wheel. It's quick (under 90 minutes minus credits) and, like the condiment whose name it shares, director Phillip Noyce's run-like-hell thriller starring Angelina Jolie satisfies a basic human taste — something to go with the popcorn. I liked it. It knows what it's doing.

Kurt Wimmer's script was initially tailored for someone else. Tom Cruise passed because the role of CIA wizard Edwin Salt hewed too closely to Ethan Hunt of the "Mission: Impossible" franchise. Edwin became Evelyn, Jolie came aboard and the results are a mixture of Cold War-era paranoia and 21st century disinterest in anything like actual spying or counterspying or, after a while, conversation. The film's primary thrust is the sight of Jolie leaping from truck to truck on a freeway, or from subway to station stop at high speed, or mowing down a surprising number of New York's finest as the audience wonders: Is this Mata Hari working for us or them, or what?

Another question: Why would anyone not recognize Jolie's character in a crowd simply because she has changed the color of her hair? I'm sorry, but that face is just too distinctively feral, yet glamorous, to blend in among extras.

On the balderdash scale, "Salt" begins way over on the left, establishing its protagonist as a supertough superspook (a North Korea prologue shows her withstanding torture without giving up her identity). Back home in America, thanks to her arachnologist husband, she and two CIA colleagues are confronted one day with a Russian defector who accuses Salt of being a sleeper agent in the employ of Russians dreaming of old-school world domination. Thus begin the running and the chasing. The action ranges from an assassination attempt on the Russian president in New York City to a threatened nuclear strike on the Middle East.

The moment when "Salt" slips from very good to pretty good can be pinpointed precisely: during a highway chase in which Salt goes from ace survivor to superhuman freak in the time it takes one heroine to survive one too many unsurvivable accidents. Well, logic, shmogic. Like the "Bourne" franchise to which Noyce's film is indebted, "Salt" is a combination of pursuit, evasion, name-clearing and a reversal or two.

Noyce has a refreshing resistance to computer-generated effects, so even when the picture's second half settles for bigger and more hyperbolic threats and a steadily mounting body count, the freneticism never hits the "Knight and Day" level. This director is more old-fashioned. He fared well with "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger" once upon the '90s, and here he relies on his very good actors, including Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor as U.S. intelligence officers with varying degrees of ambivalence about their own methods, to complement Jolie and her homemade bazooka.

My two favorite bits are small ones, which is why they're called bits. One: It may be in Wimmer's script, or it may have been cooked up by Noyce and his superlative cinematographer, Robert Elswit, but when the president calls about his nuclear options, the camera dollies in for a close-up of the dreaded red phone. It's a shot to warm the heart of cinematic Cold Warriors everywhere. And two: At a state funeral in Manhattan, Salt blasts away at the pipe organs (she has her reasons), filling the place with discordant chaos. It recalls the sinister organ-chord resounding through the valley in Alfred Hitchcock's "Secret Agent" several movie generations back. The more spy games change, the more they stay the same.